Plastic Pollution in the Ocean: Why You Should Care

Every single year, over 1.4 billion pounds of garbage and plastic are dumped into the ocean. Having gone on for decades, as the years pile up, more and more garbage, notably plastics, are taking up space that was once occupied by ocean water, plants, fauna, animals, and oxygen. The effects are detrimental to ecosystems, the planet, and even to our health and longevity.

If you are feeling motivated to do something about ocean pollution, or you want to learn more about it, we’re going to look at just a few reasons why you should care about the mass degradation of the body of water that makes up seventy percent of our planet:

Dangerous Consumption: From a personal human point of view, when we sit down and consume fish for a meal, we are eating creatures that have digested the chemicals and parabens in plastics. Not only are there risks from consuming oceanic waters, but there are cancerous risks from eating animals that eat plastic. You wouldn’t eat plastic, so why would you eat an animal that digests plastic?

Beach & Land Animal Decay: When these plastic and toxic filled marine animals wash ashore, they spread their chemicals throughout the beaches, waters, sands, and now the land animals that prey on them as part of the ecosystem. These new land animals are now ingesting the same plastic chemicals that were originally dumped into the ocean.

Low Levels of Oceanic Oxygen: The dispensation of hazardous materials, including toxins like Bisphenol A, commonly found in plastics, pollutes the water in irreversible ways since it does not breakdown within the water. Other plastic debris use oxygen as they degrade, which removes the natural amount of oxygen typically found in the water. As the prevalence of oxygen goes down, the survival of animals like whales and dolphins decreases as well.

Species Invasions: The billions of micro-plastic particles floating around the ocean can actually serve as carriers for non-indigenous invasive species. These species can potentially swallow up other existing species or introduce diseases and chemicals that the other animals have no protection to fight, thereby wiping out entire classes of animals.

Debris Pile-Ups: Certain portions of the ocean can play host to more plastics and debris than other portions of the ocean. These regions become so choked out with plastic that all surrounding plants and animals die or are forced to relocate to new climates and temperatures, where there chances of survival decrease drastically.

Ocean & CoHere at Ocean & Co, we understand just how integral the health of the ocean is to the animals, people, and plants of our entire planet. That’s why we only sell ecofriendly products that do not rely on plastic materials. Donating a portion of all of our proceeds to organizations actively fighting the plastics in the ocean, we are doing our part to decrease the amount of plastic in the gorgeous blue waters that surround us. Won’t you join us?